Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series Fleabag started out as a one-woman play at Edinburgh Fringe. Six years later, it’s a TV sensation. Writing in the Guardian, Hannah Jayne Parkinson described it as “the most electrifying, devastating TV in years” while Irish Times critic Peter Crawley said it was groundbreaking comedy. Musicians, comedians and writers have taken to Twitter to express their love for the series, with everyone from Kathy Burke to Chris of Christine and the Queens declaring it a brilliant bit of telly.

So what makes Fleabag so special? For a start, there was the sex. TV is still decidedly prudish when it comes to female masturbation but in its very first episode, we had Waller-Bridge’s character enjoying a surreptitious wank to news footage of Barack Obama while her boyfriend slept. In another episode, she breaks the fourth wall during a drunken one-night stand to tell us that she’s about to indulge in a spot of anal.

For anyone who’s ever tired of one-dimensional female characters – the hot mess, the neurotic girlfriend, the unattainable goddess – Fleabag’s protagonist was also a breath of fresh air. She was delightfully complicated – equal parts funny and troubled and selfish and manipulative and captivating to watch. The fact that her character has inspired so many think pieces shows just how rare it is to see this on TV – prompting viewers to reflect on what it means to be likeable and why we still find the idea of women who aren’t always nice so hard to swallow.

Speaking to Vice after the first season aired, Waller-Bridge said: “It was important to me that she’s funny, self-aware, and entertaining company for the audience to keep – but also, whenever she seems callous or dismissive, it’s because of underlying pain. I hoped that pathos would balance out the more caustic sides of her character. I think that a woman not giving a shit about what people think in a certain moment – being undercutting or self-aware – weirdly means that she’s a profoundly unlikeable person. I see [Fleabag] as a person whose mood changes and is defined by her pain, not necessarily her actions.”

I write from the point of view of what I’d like to watch. I’m always satisfying my own appetite

Like Channel 4’s Catastrophe, Fleabag managed to feel at once both ridiculous and uncomfortably real. The characters were heightened (the uptight sister, the inappropriate brother-in-law, the weird stepson and the awful godmother) and the storylines exaggerated, but at its heart, Fleabag spoke to some universal themes – from loss to unhappiness and toxic relationships – and mastered the difficult art of being both laugh-out-loud funny and incredibly bleak at the same time. At a time when we’re all feeling pressure to be our best selves, whether on social media or in real life, Fleabag won us over with its messed up band of misfits and their profoundly un-aspirational lives. The show has now come to an end after two seasons, but it’s unlikely we’ll forget it any time soon.

Waller-Bridge also challenged convention (and brought us more brilliant female characters) in Killing Eve, her TV adaptation of Luke Jenning’s novella series Codename Villanelle. The show featured everything we’ve come to expect from a primetime spy thriller – fast-paced action scenes, plot twists that leave us guessing its main characters’ motives, and a cliffhanger ending – but it also delivered an unexpected twist. As the show unfolded, it became less about uncovering the motives behind a spate of gory assassinations across Europe, and more about the complicated dynamic between its two female protagonists: the stylish, funny, charming but seriously disturbed assassin Villanelle (played by Jodie Comer), and the smart, talented but bored intelligence officer Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), who longs for an escape from her daily routine.

As BBC Culture critic Caryn James pointed out in her review of the series, the show takes a well-trodden concept – a female spy on the hunt for a killer – and subverts it with a compelling psychological relationship that veers between hate and lust. Add to that a distinctive soundtrack, brilliant performances and a heavy dose of droll humour, and it’s little wonder Killing Eve became one of the most talked-about TV shows of 2018. The second series has already had positive reviews in the US, and Jodie Comer’s Villanelle has been hailed as one of the best TV villains in years.

Fleabag and Killing Eve are very different shows, but both feature the kind of compelling female leads that have long been missing from TV. Speaking to the Guardian, Waller-Bridge admitted that her work is driven by a desire to make the kind of shows – and the kind of characters – she’d like to see on TV.

“I write from the point of view of what I’d like to watch. I’m always satisfying my own appetite. So I guess that means transgressive women, friendships, pain,” she said. “We sexualise women all the time in drama and TV. They are objectified. But an exploration of one woman’s creative desire is really exciting. She can be a nice person, but the darker corners of her mind are unusual and fucked up, because everyone’s are.”

With Villanelle, Waller-Bridge also broke another TV taboo: showing a woman who seemed to enjoy inflicting violence. It was a welcome respite from seeing female victims being butchered by serial killers or examined on mortuary slabs, a common trope of TV thrillers and detective shows. “I think people are slightly exhausted by seeing women being brutalised on screen,” Waller-Bridge told the Andrew Marr show. “Seeing women being violent, the flipside of that is refreshing and oddly empowering.”

Fleabag and Killing Eve are very different shows, but both feature the kind of compelling female leads that have long been missing from TV

Waller-Bridge’s talents aren’t limited to TV: she landed a place at Rada age 17 after starring in school plays, and co-founded theatre company Dry Write with her friend and long-time collaborator Vicky Jones, who wrote an episode of Killing Eve and directed Fleabag. Together, the pair have edited and directed scripts by emerging playwrights from Jack Thorne to Lucy Kirkwood as well as developing their own projects for the stage and screen. According to an interview with the Guardian’s G2, her path to success wasn’t straightforward, and she spent several years struggling to land roles as an actor before creating her own opportunities with Dry Write. She landed her first TV gig – to write a pilot for the sitcom Crashing – after putting on a series of plays at Soho Theatre, but it was her performance of Fleabag at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 that kickstarted her career, landing her comedy awards and a role in ITV’s popular murder mystery, Broadchurch.

Soon after, both Crashing and Fleabag were commissioned. And at just 33, Waller-Bridge has become one of the most celebrated TV writers and performers of the past few years. Along with performing a stage version of Fleabag in New York, she is rumoured to have been brought in to work on the script for the next James Bond film at the request of Daniel Craig.

With both Fleabag and Killing Eve, Waller-Bridge has tapped into a growing frustration with male-centric TV – and a desire for more female-led stories. It’s a cultural shift that is long overdue, but with the success of both series, perhaps we have reached a turning point in TV. Speaking to Variety, Waller-Bridge said: “It is time to start telling stories where the many shades of being female are represented, and we’ve only just started to do that. There is a marvellous sea change happening where we are profoundly shifting away from an invisible, unconscious assumption that the big stories have men at the centre, and anything else is a subset of that.”

View all the winners of The Annual 2019